50 Days 50 Films - #10 "The French Connection" (William Friedkin)

If Arthur Penn's "Bonnie and Clyde" created the New Hollywood of the 1970s, then William Friedkin's "The French Connection" (1971) perfected it.

There are only few movies — "Birth of a Nation," "Citizen Kane," "The Wild Bunch," etc. — that you can truly say pushed the narrative cinematic form forward in a single leap, and "The French Connection" is one of them. It completely redefined the Hollywood action movie, creating a template for the genre that is still used today.

Like "Citizen Kane," this is a hard movie to talk about because it is so iconic that pretty much everything that can be said about it has already been said. It's big, bombastic, gritty, and brilliant. All I'll add to the conversation is to say that, from my perspective, Gene Hackman's Popeye Doyle is perhaps the greatest movie cop in the history of ever, and that final shot has never been bested by anyone.

And that car chase. Holy shit. It still holds up.

Friedkin went on just a couple years later to similarly redefine the horror movie with "The Exorcist," before sadly descending into a morass of alternately over-ambitious and hackily forgettable movies over the next several decades ("Sorcerer," his 1971 remake of Clouzet's 1953 French classic "Wages of Fear," is a mess... but a big beautiful one). He managed to make two of the best films of all time, however, so he still has to be reckoned with.